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Core Design seem to have got the Mega CD market cornered these days. That doesn't mean that their games are all mind-blowingly good; they're not. But no other developer has devoted as much time and effort to the platform as Core have.

Their latest game, Battlecorps, takes place eight light years away from Earth, on a planet colony called Mandelbrot, whose inhabitants make a living from mining, using the latest excavation and defence robots, the Battlebots. But when the colony's bio-computerised operating system, known as MOSES, is infected with a virus by a saboteur from a rival mining company, it turns on the colonists, imprisoning them and effectively transforming the planet into a war zone. As a member of the highly trained Battlecorps, you take control of a Bipedal Attack Machine (BAM) and set off to reconquer the planet.

First impressions of Battlecorps are favourable. The game starts with a briefing from your commander, Calgary. Some jazzy rock music fades in, and then the scene dissolves to the cockpit of your BAM, where you find yourself looking out through the windscreen at Mandelbrot. Very polished.

All very good in theory, but not in practice. The missions simply don't offer enough variety; however Core try to disguise it, Battlecorps is nothing more than a basic blaster. You walk around, blast a baddy, find a switch, blast that, walk on a bit further, take out a tower, and so on until you reach the end of the mission. Now this may sound like heaven to some shoot-'em-up fans, but sadly, the action gets very tedious very soon; even the most avid blast-'em-up freaks will soon find Battlecorps' repetitive nature a big turn off. It's as if the programmers were caught in a dilemma: they wanted Battlecorps to be a strategic, mission-based shoot-'em-up, but were too afraid to follow their idea through and so chucked in lots of 'safe' shooting bits.

However, if games were judged purely on their technical accomplishment, Battlecorps would score very highly indeed. Graphically, it's fabulous. Once again, Core have managed to show off the Mega CD's hardware scaling capabilities. Although it employs the same techniques used in Thunderhawk, Battlecorps' extra colours - 64 instead of 16 - make a big difference. The sprites and scenery move smoothly and convincingly, and there are even a few texture-mapped buildings thrown in for good measure.

Neat visual touches abound. Fire a homing missile at an enemy BAM and you're treated to a vibrant explosion, with twisted bits of metal falling to the ground. When you blast a boulder, it explodes into hundreds of tiny particles. Some of the levels take place underwater and include an authentic shimmering, watery effect.

But it has to be said that Battlecorps doesn't play as well as it looks. The painful truth is that it's boring. It could quite easily have been the best game on the Mega CD - that honour still belongs to Thunderhawk - but sadly it falls short of the mark. Core must be commended for attempting to give the flagging shoot-'em-up genre a much-needed boost, but it's a shame they didn't inject some new ideas into the gameplay.